Are You More Than Your Body? Self-Objectification

Last month Tara Deliberto got in touch on LinkedIn and asked whether I’d be interested in taking a look at some resources she and others have created as part of their recent book Treating Eating Disorders in Adolescents: Evidence-Based Interventions for Anorexia, Bulimia, and Binge Eating (Deliberto and Hirsch, 2019). I said yes, forgot about it for a few weeks, then had a read, and was impressed. There are lots of excellent, unexpected tasks to disrupt disordered thought and behaviour, with plenty for the imagination to do.

One point at which I found my perspective diverging radically from theirs was a section on how you are not your body, and how it’s pathological to reduce one to the other. Here’s the relevant section:

Other People Are Not Their Bodies

The eating disorder mind-set is one of social comparison. A person is in the habit of objectifying not only their own body but also other people’s bodies and then making comparisons. But this reduces you and other people to your bodies. Just as you are not your body, other people are not their bodies. In recovery, it is crucial for you to develop in a way that allows you to respect that you are not your body and that other people are not their bodies. Other people are not here to be reduced to their size and then measured against. Their bodies exist for them to carry out their hopes, dreams, and intentions, too. In recovery, it is important to respect others as well as yourself.

Honor Your Body

Your body is like a car for your soul or self. Just as you take care of your actual car, making sure it has enough gas and gets taken in for inspections and repairs, you have to take care of your body. You have to make sure it is properly nour­ished, that you go to the doctor for annual check-ups, and that you attend to your body when it gets hurt. In this way, you can honor your body from a place of respect. In short, you help your body, and your body helps you.

(pp. 116-117)

So the thesis here is: you aren’t just your body, but you need to take good care of it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are the car, though. To get better from anorexia, separate yourself from your car.

Me and my body?

Source: James Anderson, used with permission

But I think there’s a problem here: objectifying your body (or anyone else’s) isn’t the same as treating your body as all that you are. Indeed, I think it’s actually impossible to objectify your body if you believe in a profound sense that you are nothing but your body, because then what other part of you would be turning the body (which is all of you) into an object? On the contrary, objectifying your body necessarily involves separating yourself from it (to stand in judgement on it). It also involves ignoring many aspects of it, specifically ignoring all the senses in which your body is not an object but a subject: i.e., privileging object features (shape, size, other obvious aesthetic markers, weight) over capacities, skills, and preferences. So to objectify yourself you have to act as if there is more to you than your body, and at the same time ignore a whole lot of important aspects of your body. Both are incompatible with a simple I am my body belief.

So yes, anorexia involves a lot of self-objectification (and often quite a lot of other-objectification too). But even more clearly than in other contexts, the objectifying happens thanks to self–body separation, not the opposite. Anorexia involves acting as if there’s you and then there’s the car. Anorexia is about vastly overestimating the body’s separability from mind, and not just that, but then also devaluing the body once you’ve separated it from your self: pretending you can starve it (/ leave it in the garage unloved) in the service of some ill-defined ideal without wrecking everything that makes you you. In this sense anorexia takes its place in the long inglorious history of human body denial whose best expression has tended to be found in organised religion: reject all bodily realities (hunger, sexual desire, sloth, etc.) and you’ll enhance your spirituality and reap your reward in the fictional afterlife. Of course, it’s also easy to identify a body-overvaluation thread in anorexia: it often starts with dieting to get the supposed benefits of having a thinner body, and starvation breeds further body fixation. But really they intertwine from the outset: the overvaluation of the body in an eating disorder is usually overvaluation of it as an aesthetic object (something defined by its size, shape, colour, etc.). And reducing a body to an aesthetic object is actually devaluing it.

As Deliberto and colleagues say, you are obviously not just your body size or shape, and measuring yourself or others as if you were is a marker of pathology (and a recipe for misery, sooner or later). But that doesn’t mean you aren’t just your body. Maybe the definition of body just needs some radical expansion.

The question of whether anything exists other than bodies, other than the cells that make up these bodies, and the molecules that make up the cells, and the atoms that make up the molecules, the is one of the biggest there is. It’s the mystery standing at the centre of the textbook on consciousness my mother and I published last year (Blackmore and Troscianko, 2018). Why is there something it’s like to be me? Why aren’t all the neurons just getting on with their thing ‘in the dark’? Why does the contour of this aeroplane seat feel like something to me, and how does that particular familiar sensation of tightness in my lower back and this mildly lightheaded haziness-with-clarity from the bloody Mary I’m sipping come about as a result of just nerve action, the contiguity of tissue against tissue, the dispersal of molecules amongst other molecules? There is no answer to these questions, which was what made the book such fun to write. However, most philosophers and cognitive scientists agree that separating ‘mind’ from ‘matter’ doesn’t work. If you separate the two you’re a ‘dualist’ (the most famous of whom was Descartes), but you always end up with the problem: how do the two interact? What makes you, this material organism, have a mind, or feel like you do? Descartes suggested that the mental and the material come together at the pineal gland, but he couldn’t say what magic happens there. Nor (in my opinion) can any of the philosophers or scientists who defend dualist positions today.

So whenever anyone talks about mind or self being separate from body, they’re espousing what I and many others consider an untenable philosophical position. The trouble is, there’s no obviously right alternative. The two main candidates, materialism (everything is matter) and idealism (everything is mind), still leave questions unanswered: why does it feel like mind exists?, and why does matter seem to have properties that objectively exist?, respectively. My sense is that some version of the first question not the second is the right one to be tackling, making materialism the starting point. (See our book for 600+ pages more exploration of this and related fun!) This means that I generally do my best to avoid dualist metaphors because I don’t think they reflect the structure of reality. But there are a couple of problems with this.

The first is that it’s almost impossible to write reasonably normal-sounding prose that does no mind–body separation. The structures of our language (at least the three European ones I speak) are infused with dualism. We talk about ‘my body’ and ‘my brain’, as if there were a separate me doing the owning. We talk about ‘inner’ desires, as if there were an internal space in which mental stuff happened. We talk about wanting our bodies to reflect our real selves, as though those selves were creatures hidden in the wings somewhere. We talk about struggling with being ‘in’ a bigger body or ‘carrying’ more weight once recovery is underway, as if there were some tiny homunculus me sitting inside pulling the body’s strings and getting worked up about the puppet having put on weight.

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The second caveat is that there are ways to put dualist forms of thought and speech/writing to therapeutic use. For example, you can turn them on their head to encourage a helpful kind of acceptance: you can remind yourself to trust the body to know what it’s doing, as if it had agency separate from ‘you’. This involves pretending there is a string-pulling self, but precisely in order to encourage that self to take a back seat for once. This can definitely be a useful strategy to get through patches of lost confidence, but I wonder how real recovery can ever be if the fiction remains in place that there is anything else but the conglomerate of cells that constitutes you as part of the rest of the universe. If you keep on believing in the invisible self inhabiting an inner realm, can you ever accept that nothing about any of this is optional? That there’s nothing that doesn’t change when you skip lunch because you’re going out for dinner later, or go for an extra run because your weight was higher this morning? If there is any sense in which your body – or rather, you, this body – is for you like a car you can either treat to a valet service or abandon in the garage for a few months, I’m not sure that anything you do or don’t do can ever acquire the profundity, or necessity, it really has.

This makes for an interesting hypothesis: that healing an illness requires adoption of a specific philosophical position. This also generates sub-hypotheses like: immersing yourself in materialist as opposed to dualist reading matter should improve your chances of making a full recovery, or: cultural settings in which materialism is more acceptable should allow for better recovery rates.

I may be totally wrong about this, and be over-extrapolating wildly from personal experience. The ramifications might also be more complex than ‘dualism is pro-anorexic, materialism is anti’: maybe there’s a difference between doctor/therapist and patient when it comes to what effects a given world view has or doesn’t, and how; maybe dualism has specific role to play at specific points in recovery; maybe there are dangers as well as benefits at different stages; maybe one needs to drill down deeper into the precise manifestations of dualist/materialist perspectives to say anything meaningful. But it’d be cool to start finding out.

In the second part of this post I consider an overlapping case, the case of free will, before drawing things together with some perhaps counterintuitive thoughts about what makes real, as opposed to partial or pseudo-recovery, possible.